The fairies of the theater did not succumb to any variant or any confinement. On the contrary: these days they bewitch the Espace Go – its creators and its public – with a moving play on happiness, its dictates and its lies.
Posted at 8:00 a.m.
We could not imagine a better way to reconnect with living art than the play The Ten Commandments by Dorothy Dix. In a dazzling text by Stéphanie Jasmin, Julie Le Breton delivers possibly the greatest performance of her career. Alone on stage for an hour and a quarter, the actress – who plays her very first solo here – embodies a woman who revisits her life at the dawn of her hundredth birthday.
This woman who every morning paints happiness on her face, this woman who has everything to be happy, hides in the hollow of her soul unfulfilled desires and a renunciation that eats away at her. Married to a man who venerates her to the point of suffocation, mother of a slew of children whom she cannot manage to love properly, because there are too many of them, she sees the years pass by without having a real control over his existence. She is only an image for those around her, far from her truth.
Imperial interpretation
Over the course of a non-linear score that winds and unwinds ignoring any chronology, this woman lets out the intimate voice that she has too often preferred to silence. All her life, she chose to follow the recipe for happiness of journalist Dorothy Dix, who published her advice in the American press throughout the first half of the 20th century.and century. Make up your mind to be happy; make the best of your lot… A manual built on abnegation, self-silence. In short, a user manual for a facade happiness.
Barefoot in a minimalist decor bathed in superb video projections of the seaside (also signed by the hand of Stéphanie Jasmin), Julie Le Breton is imperial in the role of this nameless woman.
Her voice modulates to sometimes take on the slow rhythm and serious tone of a centenarian, sometimes the effervescent accents of a teenager full of hopes. “I’m 10 years old, I’m 90 years old, I’m 40 years old…” Julie Le Breton’s talent as a performer, magnificently conducted by Denis Marleau, is enough to take us on a journey through time. This woman is of all ages and despite the ravages of time, she burns with the same stubborn flame that refuses to go out.
To let this text blossom in all its beauty, Denis Marleau has chosen a deliberately contained staging, far from any unnecessary distraction, where the economy of means leaves the field free for words, but also for a nuanced and superbly controlled interpretation. of an actress who has tapped into new soil to push the limits of her art even further.